Lighting Reference
This page is a place for you to learn about lighting and find some reference material to use in your pieces. 'Controllable Qualities of Light' There are five controllable qualities of light. By breaking down your lighting idea in to these qualities you will discover what needs to be done to the light or lights to achieve your desired look. Intensity Intensity is simply how bright a light is. The most direct way to affect this is by using a dimmer. In rehearsal we have the small house hold dimmers which are sufficient to control the lights we are using. There are other ways to affect the intensity of a light that are not as direct. Some of those methods are: - Changing where you point the light on the subject. This is called the focus (how it is pointing at a subject) of the light. If you put the hot spot (the part of the light beam with the highest intensity) of the light on someone’s face their face will have a higher intensity than if you focus the light on their chest and still looked at their face. -'Bounce '''lighting is when you use another surface to literally bounce the light off of to illuminate the subject. We have done this in rehearsal by using white boards. This will often cut down the intensity as light is lost when it hits the bounce surface. - By adding '''color '''or '''texture ' to the light. Often when adjusting one of these controllable qualities of light you will notice that it will affect the other qualities as well. When adding/changing color and texture you will affect the intensity of the light. Color Color is the color of the light. As you may know from physics class light is part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. White light is composed of all of the other colors of light so we are able to achieve colored light by filtering out certain wave lengths with gel 'which is also referred to as a '''color filter. '''Another note about white light. All "white" light is not made the same. White light tends to lean either '"warm" or "cool". '''Warm means there is more amber in the light and cool means there is more blue. Often white light will be referred to on a Kelvin scale. The higher the number the more blue, the lower the more amber. As an example fluorescent tubes are often 4200 Kelvin (K) our desk lamps are somewhere around 2100 K. Color can be affected by the intensity, with our desk lamps which use an incandescent source they will tend to get more amber or warm up as you dim them more. '''Direction Direction is where the light comes from on a subject. Direction can say a lot about where someone is and when they are. If you think about lighting in nature the most common source of light is our sun. Our sun is always moving in relationship to us so our shadows take different shapes and are cast in different directions depending on where the sun is. A camp fire will illuminate someone from below as would a computer screen so you wouldn't want to try and create a sunny outdoor scene by lighting someone from below, you would look to mimic the sun. Texture Texture encompasses a few aspects of the light. Texture can be adding a pattern to the light so that it casts shadows. These are called gobos or templates. By adding a gobo to a light you could make it look like someone is walking down a path that is being lit by sunlight that is coming through tree branches. We can’t use gobos in our desk lamps but we can use them to cast shadows on people. Also haze or other particles in the air can reveal the shape of a beam of light in the air which is part of its texture. The quality of how a light hits a subject is also part of its texture. A light that creates hard or sharp shadows is very different from a softer light which does not create harsh shadows. We have softened light before using a bounce as well as the “Poppins”. Movement Movement refers to two things. It can either be changes in intensity of a light or a group of lighting devices to create motion or it can be the light source itself physically moving. An example of the movement caused by intensity is a fire. A fire creates movement as the intensity changes. In a theatrical production movement is also achieved when the light cues illuminate a different section of the stage to draw focus. We can also move the source of the light or change the focus of the light. There are lights that do this through motors and electronics but we can achieve the same effect by re-directing our desk lamps. Section heading Write the second section of your page here. Category:Technology